User Acquisition

The process of gaining new users or customers. In early-stage startups, this almost always starts with manual, unscalable methods before transitioning to repeatable channels.

Phase 1: Founder-Led (Pre-PMF)

Before product-market-fit, the founder must personally acquire every user:

• Manual recruitment: Go door-to-door, email by email, demo by demo
• The Collison Installation: Don’t send a link — set people up on the spot (Stripe)
• Concierge onboarding: Personally help each user get value from the product
• Community infiltration: Go where your users are (Pinterest’s founder at design blogger conferences)

The goal is not scale — it’s learning. Every conversation teaches you about your customer.

Phase 2: Founder-Led Sales (Post-PMF)

Once you have PMF, founders should still lead sales before hiring a team:

The 3Ws Framework

1. Why Buy Anything? — Is the pain severe enough to motivate change?
2. Why Buy Us? — What makes your solution better than alternatives?
3. Why Buy Now? — What creates urgency?

Practical Advice

• Base conversations in empathy, not manipulation
• Disqualify aggressively — focus on prospects who will actually close
• Avoid premature product demos; ask discovery questions first
• Track deals like engineering problems (20% = answered 3Ws, 50% = action plan)
• Don’t transition to a sales team until you’ve done 50+ demos with 20%+ win rate

Common Founder Mistakes

• “I don’t want to bother people” — you’re solving their problem, not bothering them
• Leading with features instead of discovery questions
• Interpreting pauses as disapproval and rushing to demo

Phase 3: Scalable Channels

Once the sales motion is repeatable, scale through channels that match your go-to-market-strategy:

Channel	Best For	Key Metric
Word-of-mouth	Products with strong PMF	NPS, referral rate
Content/SEO	Information-seeking audiences	Organic traffic, CAC
Paid ads	Products with clear ROI	CAC, payback period (<3mo)
Referral programs	Products with network effects	Viral coefficient
Direct sales	>$500 LTV products	Pipeline, close rate
Partnerships	Complementary products	Revenue share

Altman’s rule: recover customer acquisition cost within 3 months for low-LTV products.

What Doesn’t Work

• Big launches — successful startups rarely remember their own
• PR as primary growth strategy — press doesn’t drive sustained growth
• Partnerships with large companies — almost never work for early traction
• “If we build it, they will come” — they won’t

See Also

• do-things-that-dont-scale
• growth
• go-to-market-strategy
• unit-economics
• product-market-fit

Sources

• Do Things That Don’t Scale — Paul Graham
• Startup Playbook — Sam Altman
• Leslie’s Compass — First Round Review

Backlinks

• about-this-wiki
• community-building
• decision-making
• distribution
• do-things-that-dont-scale
• founder-faq
• founder-faq-slides
• founder-led-sales
• glossary-of-frameworks
• go-to-market-strategy
• growth
• growth-loops
• lenny-first-1000-users
• niche-selection
• onboarding
• pg-do-things-that-dont-scale
• pitching
• pricing-strategy
• product-led-growth
• programmatic-seo-zapier
• start-here
• the-startup-lifecycle
• the-startup-lifecycle-slides